Prior art search techniques for adding users and/or applications as well as updating user and application information has required the user and/or a system administrator to modify and update user information for each user and for each application. This process can be time consuming and because much of the information is identical, the process is highly repetitive and fraught with the possibility of errors in data entry, updated, and/or user environment customization.
A window management system provides many of the important features of modern user computer interfaces. A window management system allows multiple applications to interact with the user on a single computer display, and provides low level functions for the application to display data and collect input from the user. The window management system permits application programs to show results in different areas of the display, to resize the screen areas in which those applications are executing, to pop-up and to pull-down menus. The window management system is a resource manager in much the same way that an operating system is a resource manager, only the types of screen area to various applications that seek to use the screen and then assists in managing these screen areas so that the applications do not interfere with one another. The window management system also allocates the resources of interaction devices to applications that require a user input and then routes the flow of input information from the devices to the event queue of the appropriate application for which the input is destined.
The look and feel of the user computer interface is determined largely by the collection of interaction techniques provided for it. Designing and implementing interaction techniques for each individual application would be a time consuming and expensive task. Furthermore, each application would end up with a different look and feel making it difficult for a user to move from one application to another. Applications sharing a common window management system can utilize a common interactive technique toolkit built for the window management system to assure a common look and feel. An interactive technique toolkit consists of a set of subroutines that provide different types of display objects.
Interactive technique toolkits, which are subroutine libraries of interaction techniques, are mechanisms for making a collection of techniques available for use by application programs. By using interactive technique toolkits, a consistent look and feel among application programs sharing a common window management system can be insured. Using the same toolkit across all applications is a commonly used approach for providing a look and feel that unifies both multiple applications and the window environment itself. Interactive technique toolkits are available for specific windowing management systems. For instance, the menu style used to select window operations should be the same style used within all applications. Basic elements of the toolkit can include menus, dialog boxes, scroll bars, file selection boxes and the like, all which can be conveniently implemented in windows.
The X Window System is an example of a window management system that can be used in association with the present invention. One of the most important features of this type of window management system is that it supports device independence by separating the interactions with the display, keyboard and mouse from the rest of the system. This type of windowing system has three basic parts: a library of routines at the lowest level; a framework which allows the application developer to combine components from the library to produce a complete user interface; and an interactive toolkit that supports a set of user interface components known as widgets and include such things as scroll bars, menus and buttons.
The architecture of this type of window management system is based on the client-server model. A single process, known as the server, is responsible for all input and output devices. The server creates and manages all windows on the screen, produces text and graphics, and handles input devices such as the keyboard and mouse. The server implementation is independent of any application but is hardware specific. In a typical environment the application is a client and uses the services of the server via a network connection using an asynchronous byte stream protocol. Multiple clients can connect to the same server. The server hides the details of the device-dependent implementation of the server from the clients.
A window manager process allows the user to control the size and location of windows on the screen. These operations are generally performed by a window man, another client application. In this configuration, it is possible for the window manager to get events pertaining to the resizing or moving of windows from the server independent of the notification of these events to the application. The window manager acts independently from the application and, together with the server, may cause the user interface to be modified without the application being involved.
The windows system requires that the application developer be intimately familiar with operation of the windows system including the library, framework, the toolkit, the window manager, and the server. The complexity of the windows system and the expertise required makes user interface development more costly and can result in longer application development cycles using more resources. The complexity of the windows system results in code that is more difficult to write, error prone and difficult to maintain.
It thus would represent a significant advance in the art of distributed computing environments operating a windowing type operating system to have a technique where a single, centralized file contains information about users and applications and the file can be readily, easily, and efficiently modified through a customization user interface to add, delete, and/or update user and application information or to tailor user compute environments.